


Maxwell's Demon

by IronicPuppies



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:14:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4954732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronicPuppies/pseuds/IronicPuppies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Elizabeth Maxwell, the girl who angered Steelix, and how her journey to face powerful pokemon and the scientific anomalies that brought them to her world turned her into a legend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spatial Distortion

I could tell John was nervous. He always had an air of cocksure superiority about himself but that night he was quiet, still, consciously trying not to look around for fear of revealing his unease to me.

“You scared?” I teased him with raised eyebrows.

He snickered and shook his head. “I’m not scared, Liz.”

“Afraid your head will explode?” I mimed an exploding head with my hands. “Not completely unreasonable you know.”

He narrowed his eyes then looked away. “I know it’s supposed to be safe.”

“Supposed to?” I say. “You sound confident.” I know he’s never been to a spatial distortion before. Neither have the other two who are supposed to meet us here tonight. I’ve only been here once before. It’s a region of space that has become warped and no longer obeys the rules of Euclidean geometry. Its most distinctive trait is the way it curves light so that it looks like you’re staring into a giant lens, but the reason we’re here is to bend.

I stand up and silently lean against the wall, purposefully jutting my left hip out as I face him. I know he likes it because when he thinks I’m staring off into space I catch his eyes flit downward and look me over. “Bending’s fun. No reason to be so stiff about it.” I wink at him but he doesn’t even smile.

“Liz, chill, I’m fine with all of this. I was just thinking about my granddad. You know he used to have a drug problem.”

I shrugged. “It’s not a drug. Sure it temporarily messes with your brain chemistry but no one has ever died from one, not even the class five distortions. And this one has been basically cleared as completely safe.”

“Yeah, I know Liz. I told you I’m fine.”

I rolled my eyes and shoved him in the shoulder. “Off your balance today huh?”

Finally he grinned. “Don’t even.” He stood up and held out his hands. “Let’s go.” So we held up our hands and played. The game was a test of balance. You had to keep both feet planted and the only contact you could have with the other person was pushing on their palms with your own, and the first one to move a foot was the looser. He usually won but when I did I made sure to rub it in his face.

As soon as he got in position I smacked his palms and he stumbled backward.

“What the hell was that?” His eyes flared and he got into position again while I stuck my tongue out at him. “Let’s go again,” he said.

This time when I shot my hands out he grabbed them and then when I pulled them back he toppled onto me as we hit the wall of the entrance building.

“Come on now, that’s just straight up cheating,” I said. But we both just started laughing.

When the other two finally arrived we’d already devolved into a boxing match. Nothing too violent but I did knock the air out of him once.

I can’t even remember the names of the other two who joined us that night. They weren’t honor students so I didn’t really give a damn. All I do remember is they were holding hands when they approached us.

“You guys ready?” I asked as they joined us, barely able to contain my excitement.

The boy nodded nervously and the girl asked if it was dangerous and if there were guards around.

“You’ll be fine.” I laughed a bit and then started working the door open with a crowbar. John insisted on helping me. When we finally wedged it open we both stumbled back into the other two and laughed again. I saw an unspoken challenge in John’s eyes; whoever got to the basement last was a coward, so we both walked through the door without even waiting for the other two.

We made our way down staircases and past hallways covered in graffiti of the others who had made illicit visits to this sacred underground lair in the past. Surprisingly one of the overhead lights still worked, so we flipped it on and there in front of us we could see it, the spatial distortion.

John stood in place, mouth open, smile slowly forming at the edges of his mouth. I walked a bit along its perimeter. The door on the opposite side of the room warped and rapidly receded as it approached the center of my field of vision. I took a step forward.

“Wait, are you going in already?” The other boy asked as he and the girl entered the room.

I looked back at them. “Yeah, it’s fine.” Then I broke out into a sprint toward the center. The world shrunk and warped away from me, and the door opposite me grew a little closer while John and the others shrunk precipitously when I looked back at them.

Finally the visual distortion evened out and I knew I’d reached the center. “Come on in!” I yelled, feeling a little out of breath. Or perhaps the bending had already taken effect.

First I saw John start to walk toward me, moving at an almost glacial pace. I couldn’t help laughing hysterically. Yeah, the bending had definitely started taking effect. The other two, holding hands once again, made their way in as well, swiveling their heads to take in the visual spectacle the whole way in.

When they all reached me at the center, wide smiles on their faces, John looked to me and slowly nodded his head. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

The other two became fascinated with the iron meshed floor and wouldn’t stop speculating as to how it was constructed inside of a spatial distortion. I will admit, it had an amazing geometry to it.

I felt a wave of bending coming on so I walked closer to John. I think he was starting to feel it too. He swayed back and forth, putting his hand up to light and scanning the warped background of the abandoned lab.

“Do you hear something?” he asked.

I grinned at him. “That’s the bending. Sometimes it makes you hear things, sometimes you see things, and sometimes you just feel really really good.” Then I felt a powerful breath well up from inside me and started giggling as I felt my body become almost half as light as it usually is. At first I couldn’t tell if it was in my head or we were beginning to go weightless but then I saw the other two start jumping higher into the air.

“Antigrav’s kicking in!” Then I found myself in John’s arms, sitting on the floor, unsure of how I got there, and apparently still giggling. One of my hands ran up his chest, then through his short jet black hair. His eyes narrowed at me more than they usually look but I could only focus on running my fingers down his light earthy colored and subtly muscular arms. “Spin me!” I yelled at him.

“You can’t hear that?” he asked again, ignoring my wandering hands.

I stood up slowly, watching the other two holding hands and frolicking across the noisy mesh floor in the presence of reduced gravity.

“John!” He looked at me and rubbed his forehead for a moment, so I grabbed the front of his shirt, pulled him close and kissed him. For a minute there he ignored the voices in his head and kissed me back, running his hands across my cheeks and down my back. I could feel strands of hair begin to stand on end. I’d heard some very preliminary asymmetry studies that class one distortions provided higher antigravity for light wispy appendages like strands of hair. It was exhilarating, I was lost in his embrace and yet my mind was opened, separated from my body to admire the physics of it all.

“Liz, are you sure this is okay?” He asked after pulling away from me.

“Oh just kiss me again already!”

“No, not that.” He held a hand to his head. “I swear I can hear something. It’s like it’s right next to my head.”

“What’s it sound like?” I didn’t really care, I just figured he’d shut up about it quicker that way.

“It’s like an animal, a cat maybe? I can’t place it. I think it’s trying to talk to me.”

I pushed him away and made a running jump into the air, staying afloat for almost three seconds I think. “Look at this place! It’s amazing.” I could feel my heart pounding, a series of periodic explosions getting louder by the second. I danced to that beat, twirling and running and jumping into the air until I finally stumbled on my own ankle and fluttered to the ground like a feather.

“John, come dance with me!” I raised my head and the world around me swirled for a moment before the oscillations decayed into a steady state and I saw the other two, far away standing pressed up against the southern wall of the lab, then I slowly turned and saw John at the eastern wall.

I couldn’t stand so I crawled along the rattling mesh toward him. He later told me I was breathing heavily and moaning out loud as I did, but I can’t remember making any sound then.

I already knew that distances inside this distortion were much longer but even so it felt like I crawled for hours before reaching John. He was sitting against the wall, eyes closed and head rhythmically rolling around as if to the sound of music.

“John!” I started laughing at him again, then straddled him and leaned in to whisper in his ear whatever lunatic thoughts I had at the time.

“No, Liz, get off. I can still hear it.”

“You gonna kiss me again?”

He pushed me off and walked outside. I remember only collapsing to the ground and laughing until I ran out of breath.

I don’t know how long I laid there, but it wasn’t until my heartbeat faded from my hearing that I started to worry about scaring John off. The other two were talking with each other in a corner. They barely noticed me walk back up the stairs. Outside I couldn’t see John in the dark at first but through the trees I saw his silhouette in the moonlight, standing by the shore.

“Hey John,” I said, trying to keep as quiet as possible. “Went a little crazy in there, huh?”

He glanced at me for a moment, then looked out at the ocean again. “Yeah.”

“Sorry about… you know, whatever.” I felt my cheeks growing hot with embarrassment.

He shrugged. “I’m fine. Just felt really weird in there.”

I took a seat on a fallen tree stump and motioned for him to join me. As he took a seat I ran my hand through the soft wet sand at our feet. “I know it’s… uh…” How was I supposed to breach the subject? What do you say in that position? We’d been in this limbo where we both knew we liked each other but hadn’t said or done anything about it yet. The night was one long blur.

“Elizabeth?” I heard the girl calling. They’d made their way up as well.

“Over here.” I waved at them.

“Oh my god, that was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced!” the girl said, her face aglow and hands gesticulating wildly.

She and her boy started going on how I was so cool to have shown it to them and John mostly nodded and gestured at the conversation without saying much, but before I had a chance to talk with him alone again we heard a low rumbling from further beyond the old lab entrance.

That’s when we first laid eyes on it. It was one of the monsters. I recognized the general shape of its giant segmented snakelike body but this one was covered in a shiny metallic coat that reflected the moonlight.

John asked what we all had on our minds. “Is that an Onix?”

But it wasn’t an Onix, it had large triangular eyes and an almost demonic smile.

As the monster raised its head above the building it trained its eyes on us and let out a low pitched bellow before wildly plunging its head into the lab entrance’s roof. I didn’t see what happened next. The other two were already running away when John grabbed my hand and yanked me away. As we ran toward the gap in the gate we’d entered through, the ground shook and fearsome bellowing echoed through the air that night, and in the morning we heard the news: the building had been completely demolished and the spatial distortion was buried. We would never set foot down there again.

That was all more than two years ago, but they still call me Elizabeth Maxwell, the girl who angered Steelix.


	2. Taunt of a Calm Mind

I started dating a guy named Luigi when I first entered university, but after the first week or so I could already tell it wouldn’t last. He had this pet Pikachu named Faraday that he’d bring to lecture and whisper to in this disgusting cutesy baby voice. I’d picked up on a little psychic ability myself and I could tell that little Pikachu hated Luigi’s voice.

But hey, dating Luigi seemed to piss off John for some reason so I stuck around with him a little longer. Honestly I’m not sure whether I wanted to make John come after me again or just fuck with his head, but it was fun either way.

John unsurprisingly chose to major in biology with a specialization in metaphysical biology. I still can’t quite believe they actually called it ‘metaphysical.’ Did someone just decide that since we can’t figure out how the monsters’ biology works we should just call it magic? That’s just lazy science, even if it’s only terminology.

Seemed like half our incoming class went into metaphysical biology, probably more. Though I will admit there was a high demand for people who could deal with the monsters.

When I first remember being told about the monsters as a child, 132 species had been discovered, some of them related to each other through a type of metamorphosis event that the scientifically illiterate in the media dubbed “evolution.”

Since then a few more discoveries have been made, like the generation of Grimer from X-Ray scattering experiments at the class four spatial distortions, or the discovery of the firebird. I hear it’s been named Moltres. They’ve even found entirely new species in other countries, including the metallic snake I saw that night two years before, but despite everyone else’s excitement over the Mons I still couldn’t bring myself to study them.

“Hi, are you Elizabeth Maxwell?” Professor Alcubierre entered the office while I was apparently daydreaming.

I tensed as I was alerted to his presence. “Yes.” I stood with a smile and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

He smiled back. “Nice to meet you too.”

I’d seen pictures of him in the admissions materials when I applied but he looked different in person. He was unshaven, with short dark brown hair, soft eyes and a sharp jawline, wearing jeans, running shoes and a t-shirt from the recent international conference for anomalous topology.

“So how has your first year been so far?” he asked.

I can only hope I pushed past my star struck admiration of him to come up with an intelligible answer. Either way, once we got past the small talk he showed me around his lab, introduced me to some of his students, even let me see the artificially generated spatial distortions they’d managed to create on campus. It was a dream come true. Alcubierre was one of the most respected physicists in the country and he was going to give me the opportunity to work for him.

After the tour I got a call from Luigi asking if I could look after Faraday for the weekend. Apparently he had something with his parents, I don’t even know, so I brought the little Mon back to my place while I skimmed a few of Alcubierre’s papers, only to get hopelessly lost in the math.

“Pika!” It was sitting on my desk, looking at me with perky ears and tail.

I shifted a bit in my seat on the couch and went back to reading.

“Pika pika.” It wiggled its tail a bit.

“You want something?” Perhaps I was being paranoid but I think Faraday could sense I was annoyed because he only smiled and continued to ‘pika’ at me. He was such a troll. Of all the Mons Luigi could have chosen to keep as a pet he had to pick the one that sounded like a squeaky toy.

“Pika.”

“You know it’s not cute after the first hundred times.”

He leapt off the table and bounded into my lap. I felt a small discharge of static electricity jolt my body into a further angered state. “You’re so needy! What? You hungry again?”

He sniffed my papers and then leapt off the couch to cuddle against my backpack on the ground. Of course I could be a troll too...

The upside of spending a lot of time around Faraday was the chance to develop my own psychic abilities. One of the first peculiarities people discovered about the Mons was the possibility of developing a psychic connection with them. At first it was just a few enthusiasts rambling on about some hokey ‘spiritual oneness’ they felt with the Mons, but after time and study it was found that some people could actually mentally transfer information to and from the monsters they’d bonded with.

I guess you could say that was another reason people wanted to keep them as pets. The connection was difficult to establish so it soon became common for the wealthy to adopt the cutest and friendliest Mons as pets so that their owners could practice on forming the elusive psychic connection over a long period of time. That’s why Luigi got Faraday at least.

I glared at Faraday for a minute, trying to imagine what a tiny electric mouse would be most afraid of. I concentrated on making my thoughts accessible to him and then yelled, “It’s a Golem!”

He perked up real quick and looked around the room in panic before realizing that I’d only been messing with him. I went back to reading for a bit and Faraday fell asleep. At least I didn’t see him move until the fire alarm.

It was one of those awful industrial building-wide alarms, part blaring horn and part high-pitched siren, accompanied by bright flashing lights. Faraday discharged like a Van de Graaff generator when it started.

Somehow I managed to pick Faraday up and carry him outside without getting myself shocked. Most of the other students exited toward the front of the building but it was shorter for me to take the back exit where I saw a handful of others sitting on the benches outside, including a familiar face.

“Hey John.”

He looked up at me and smirked despite his obvious frustration with the alarm. “Twenty eight hours.” He sauntered toward me. “Twenty eight hours I’ve been up and when I finally get a chance to sleep they pull another drill.”

I smiled back at him. “Who knows, maybe if we’re lucky another Mon’s breached the border.”

He chuckled. “Would not bet on that.”

“Pika!”

I scratched Faraday’s head. “Yeah I know, we all want to go back inside.”

“Is that Luigi’s?” John asked.

I nodded.

“I’m always curious how much you can actually understand of them. Tried on a Bulbasaur for a bit but didn’t have much luck.”

I caught a motion in my peripheral vision so I scanned the bushes. “You see something out there?” I stepped toward the forested area behind our building and then a Rhyhorn stumbled out from behind a large tree.

“Woah, be careful.” John stepped forward between me and the Mon.

“John, chill, I’m not gonna do anything stupid.” I knew as well as he did it wasn’t likely to attack unless we threatened it. Course it could mow us over in a second but for the most part any Rhyhorn that made it into populated areas mostly bumbled around searching for scraps of food.

The others on the benches took notice as well and crept closer so John warned them not to crowd it too much. It waddled toward us and sniffed the air, then turned and headed down the sidewalk only to run into a lamppost.

Faraday jumped down and raced to the lamppost.

“Hey, get back here.” He ignored me of course.

For a moment the two Mons exchanged glances before the Rhyhorn started bashing its horn repeatedly into the lamppost. They weren’t known for harming humans very often, but they were notorious for property damage.

“It’s okay, it won’t attack us, it just wants the post out of its way.” I’ve noticed John does that a lot. It’s like he thinks he’s got this natural born authority. He calmly began herding the gathered students back toward the building.

I’m not sure what possessed me to do it but I stepped closer to the Rhyhorn and kneeled on the sidewalk. Faraday sprinted back into my arms and I started to speak to the wild Mon.

“You don’t have to move it out of your way.”

It continued bashing the post.

“Liz, what the hell you doing? I can handle this.”

I ignored John and spoke again to the Rhyhorn. “You can stop that if you want. It’s not going to move on its own. You can go around.”

It stopped ramming and turned to look at me. Its eyes looked confused, maybe curious. It sniffed at the air and then turned back to the post and continued to hammer away at the post, though now banging it from the side rather than head on.

“You don’t have to keep doing that. You can go around.”

“Liz.” John was now standing behind me. “What you trying to prove?”

“Hey, Rhyhorn.” I normally avoided calling them by their human given names, because honestly their human given names were usually pretty ridiculous, but that night I was on to something. “Rhyhorn, I’m telling you there is another way. You can go around. Go around the post.”

It continued bashing at the post. By now the metal had bent and the light was leaning at a severe angle. The Rhyhorn kept ramming away, getting quicker until it finally lunged out to the side, slammed its rear end into the side of the post then continued walking down the sidewalk.

I stood up and eyed John. “Booyah, suck on that.” The moment called for a celebratory dragon dance.

He rolled his eyes. “You do know they sometimes give up and go around obstacles, right?”

I stood really close to him. “Just admit it, I can talk to the Mons and you can’t.” I stuck out my tongue for good measure.

He shrugged, trying to play it cool. “Maybe. But I’d like to see what you’d do if it turned to attack.”

“What, were you gonna save us all?”

“Do I have to remind you who among us wrestled a Machop and won?” He does tend to bring that up, usually omitting the part about the Machop being poisoned.

“All I’m hearing is talk, buddy.”

We exchanged smug smirks and it was quiet enough for us to hear campus security near the end of the building find the Rhyhorn and call off the fire alarm.

“Pika pika!” Faraday squirmed in my arms.

“Yeah, we’re going back in.” I turned toward the door.

“Hey Liz.” John checked his phone for a moment. “You going to the party tomorrow?”

Oh yeah, he still wanted me. “Maybe.”

He followed me inside the building. “You should come. It’ll be fun. Especially without Luigi.”

“What do you mean without Luigi?” I knew exactly what he meant; Luigi hated loud crowded areas, especially when they’re crowded with drunk people. This was a surprise to me since I first met him at a party.

He shrugged. “Just seems like you have more fun without him.” He stopped before climbing the staircase to gaze lazily out the nearby window. “You know, I still don’t understand why the fire alarm goes on when there’s an intrusion. If there’s a potentially dangerous Mon wandering campus why do you want people to be outside where they could meet it?”

“They don’t want people inside if there’s structural damage.” A while back a Magmar started a fire that melted some support beams and collapsed part of a building’s second floor.

“I know, but those cases are rare. Usually it’s stuff like this Rhyhorn. It’s not gonna take out a building.”

I yawned. “Yeah. Whatever.” Faraday squirmed again, indicating he wanted to be back in my room. “Well good night John.”

He nodded. We parted ways. It wasn’t until halfway up the stairs that I heard the sound of shattering glass. Out the translucent staircase windows I saw a large gray figure smashing through the glass walls of our neighboring dorm’s student lounge.

“John!” I yelled as I hurried back down the stairs. Faraday leapt out of my arms but at that moment I didn’t bother to chase him down.

I used to have this image in my head of what people would do in a disaster, you know, something like a drill headed monster demolishing a building. I always imagined people running and yelling and screaming, just general chaos all around, but they were eerily quiet. Sure there were some cursing in disbelief, some calling to their friends to run to safety, but most of them stood and watched. They stood there as a Rhydon trampled through desks and chairs.

“Liz!”

I turned around and saw John carrying Faraday.

“We’ve gotta get that thing away from the building,” he said.

Cocky bastard, he’s the only guy I know who can casually suggest taking on a Rhydon like that. I looked around. A couple days earlier tree trimmers came through our part of campus and left a few large branches lying in nearby bushes. I picked one up and started banging it on the nearest lamppost. “Hey! Over here!”

Rhydon turned its head toward me and John got the idea. He picked up another branch, ran to the next lamppost and started banging away. “Hey! I’m over here now! Come on!” He then looked at me with an urgent expression just as Faraday leapt out of his other arm. “Liz, draw it toward the field.”

To the east of the dorms was a large field, essentially a university public park, with no buildings and plenty of trees for cover. I started running past John to the next lamppost but out of the corner of my eye I saw Faraday scaling a tree.

“Pika!” A white bolt flashed from Faraday to Rhydon’s horn, which only succeeded in making it angry enough to swipe violently at the tree’s branches.

“Faraday!” I yelled. “Leave it alone!” The frightened Pikachu sprinted back toward me and I continued to the next lamppost.

By the time John ran past me to the next furthest post the Rhydon was colossally angry, bellowing at us in this frightening low tone, crushing benches under its feet like dry leaves. Its pace quickened. I started to panic. “John!” I looked back and saw him motioning me further into the park.

We didn’t have any more time to stop and lure it away, it was chasing us. Every time I looked back it seemed to anger at my gaze and bash its head into the nearest tree branch.

My hands were shaking. “John, what do we do now?”

He silently scanned the forest, hyperventilating as we maneuvered our way between the trees until he abruptly stopped and we turned back to see where the Rhydon was. I reminded myself that despite its size we could outrun it if necessary. That’s when I realized there were men running toward us. I heard the whoosh of a tranquilizer gun and then Rhydon’s last angry roar.

Once the men surrounded it my eyes and ears were flooded with awareness. The final groans of the drowsy Rhydon, wind blowing through the trees, the grass beneath my feet, curious stares of people out by the edge of the park, and every slight twitch of John’s hand wrapped around mine.

One of the younger members of the team thanked us for our help but told us we should get back to the dorm. I started laughing like I did the night we visited the spatial distortion. I was on top of the world, I was invincible.

“Liz. Are you okay? Sure you didn’t get hurt?” he asked when we were finally alone in my room.

I nodded, unable to contain my smile. “I’m fine.”

He grinned too. “That was insane. I can’t believe we just did that.”

I took a hold of his shirt, his eyes flashed, and we kissed. At first it was slow but the adrenaline and sweat and hot coursing blood took over and before we knew it he threw my shirt at the wall and we fell into my bed.


	3. Rain Dance

“So you’re the girl that angered Steelix.” His name was Vincent and he had the eyes of a predator.

I debated spitting out some witty line about not angering me but instead I replied with a simple, “that’s me.”

He playfully winked at me. “So what’s the real story on that? I heard you broke into the spatial distortion alone.”

As much as I’d love to have been the lone discoverer of the iron snake I told him the truth. “Actually I was there with three others, but the next day they were too scared to admit they’d broken in with me so I got all the credit.” Alright, I guess John wasn’t so much scared as he was suddenly obsessed with phantom cats, but these are small details.

He nodded his head with a mixture of admiration and lust. “Damn, you are something else. I do not know a single girl who could face a Rhydon without breaking out crying, let alone a Steelix.”

I knew at least twenty girls content to watch me and John face that thing as if they were watching a gladiator match and they didn’t shed a tear but hey, whatever.

“You know what people have been calling you?” he asked.

I casually shook my head. “Haven’t heard.” Of course I’d heard, but it sounds so good when other people say it.

He leaned in and gave me one of those you’re-gonna-like-what-I’m-about-to-say eyebrow raise. “They’re calling you the girl who taunted Rhydon.”

Damn right they are.

I was almost back to feeling good when Anna returned carrying our drinks. “So Vince,” she said, “now that you’ve met Liz, did she tell you that she’s single?”

I took a drink.

Vincent shook his head. “I hadn’t got around to asking.”

Anna winked at me and continued. “Yeah, she just dumped her boyfriend. Real loser. He had a Pikachu and you know what they say about people with Pikachus.”

“You don’t have to lie about it,” I told her. “He broke up with me.”

“Yeah, but that story’s no fun,” she said.

“You think I give a shit what this goober thinks about it?” I said, pointing to Vincent. “Luigi broke up with me, whatever, I’m over it.”

Vincent chuckled. “Hey now, no need for name calling.”

I took another drink.

Anna stopped talking for a moment, trying to read my expression like she usually does. She’d been talking about setting me up with some guy ever since I told her I got dumped, despite my vehement protestations. “I thought you hated Luigi?” she said. “What’s the big deal, I thought you were going to break up with him anyway?”

“Yeah, I was.”

Anna looked flustered so she turned back to Vincent. “Anyway, so what else do you do?”

“Outside of school? I volunteer at the foster home.” He answered Anna but he was still thinking of me. I was hot, a major badass, and just a little bit of a moody bitch, which was more than enough to set his mind wandering into a thousand little tangents, trying to figure out how he’d get me to his place tonight.

“Mostly I just help clean or move shit,” he continued, “but I’m thinking of applying to become a mentor.”

“Hey, I’m getting a call,” I interrupted him. “I’ll be outside for a bit.” Of course I wasn’t getting a call, I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with him. Especially if he wanted to talk about the importance of the mentoring program.

I knew all about the mentoring program; I’m one of the genome babies. Back when birth rates fell below death rates and people were having a fit over the impending population crisis, someone in the government had the idea to start growing some lab babies. The technology had been around for a while to not only grow humans outside the womb, but to select for genetic traits, and even though the proposal was almost entirely unsuccessful, here on the island they managed to acquire the funding and legislative support to go ahead with it, and so here I am. I was designed in a lab, given longevity and above average intelligence, selected to have charisma, ambition, empathy, humility, and stubbornness, then told that they had high hopes I would one day join the political elite. So I decided to become a scientist instead.

Anyway, the mentoring program, that was the most recent change to the program. Since the beginning they’d hired child development professionals to guide our growth while we lived at the home, but considering most of us were supposed to be highly intelligent and ambitious and the fact that we outnumbered the staff, they occasionally had to fight a rebel uprising.

They introduced the mentoring program in an attempt to address this. They had people closer to our age sign up and each take a kid under their wing, with the hope that we’d find them to be more relatable authority figures and not act out so much, but these were usually successful university students looking to score community outreach points for future job opportunities. Not quite the types best suited for babysitting. At the end of the first day with my mentor, we agreed that I’d lie and say we met weekly in exchange for neither of us having to see each other again.

“Liz, what’s going on with you?” She found me.

I don’t know how she does it but she knows something is bothering me. “Luigi didn’t even know about John.”

She’s keen enough to ask me how I’m feeling but can’t figure out my meaning. “But you said that you told him about it.”

“Yeah, but only after he broke up with me.” Luigi told me that he met someone else and that he didn’t think we worked well together. I told him that I’d cheated on him with John that time he asked me to look after Faraday. I told him how John came up to my room and climbed on top of me and that stupid little Pikachu just watched from the corner and all Luigi said was ‘Why are you telling me this?’ He wasn’t even angry.

“So you mean he broke up with you without knowing you cheated on him?”

“Yes! For fuck sake yes.”

Anna shook her head and her voice took on an angrier tone. “What the hell is wrong with you Liz? So you’re not upset he broke up with you, but you are upset that he did without knowing you cheated on him? Are you that full of yourself?” She paused for a sanctimonious shake of her head. “You know what, I’m going inside.”

And so she went back in and I didn’t say a thing.

~

I woke up the next day to an overcast sky and the usual Rain Dance text alerts. I walked to Alcubierre’s lab in a mild drizzle and amid low rumbles of distant thunder I caught myself a couple times looking to the sky in search of white flashes of light but none came.

The lab was almost empty except for the professor and Michael the lab tech.

“Hey, it’s our resident celebrity,” Michael said. “Nice to know we have somebody to defend us from the Mons.”

I shrugged like it was no big deal. “I’m very intimidating.”

The both laughed and Alcubierre stood up. “Well at least we know if science doesn’t work out then you’ve got the fight clubs.” He walked over to me and handed me a copy of some research notes. “We might actually have to evacuate soon, but at least you can read up on the compression designs.”

“Really? You think it’s a legit Rain Dance this time?” I asked.

Alcubierre didn’t respond but Michael nodded toward the window. “See the swirl?”

He was right, the characteristic curling cloud formation had just begun. At least in the meantime I had reading material. “I guess we should start heading to the basement?”

They both sighed and nodded in agreement, and a few minutes later the alarms went off so we made our way underground. There was a dedicated subbasement office space for these situations, admittedly a small area but most people actually stayed home that day. Alcubierre and Michael took seats at a couple workstations and delved into some debate about maglev technology, and I almost joined them but I saw John at the other end of the room with his new best friend so I walked over to say hi.

“Oh man, it’s Liz!”

I waved back. “Hey Blaine.”

“Dude, this is perfect, now you and John can go outside and kick some Gyarados ass.”

John saw the paper I was holding. “What you reading?”

“Sevii project,” I said.

Blaine’s eyes widened in recognition. “So you’re working on, like, those pocket dimensions?”

I nodded but John only gave me a blank stare so I explained the project to him. Alcubierre and a group of other professors had recently secured a large grant from the Sevii corporation, a shipping company operating primarily between here and Sinnoh, to develop a cargo compression system based on spatial distortion technology.

One of Alcubierre’s main research thrusts was in studying the anti-gravity properties of distortions and he’d found that in some cases compactifying a large region of space into a smaller one could decrease the weight of the mass contained inside. The issues were primarily instabilities in the distortions as well as the energy requirements to maintain them. In addition to the reduced fuel costs that a compactified and lighter load would bring them, Sevii also had an interest in making their shipping vessels easier to accelerate in the open ocean on account of the Gyarados attacks.

As I finished explaining, John only grinned off into space. “What?” I said. “You look like an idiot right now.”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just thinking of the night we went to the old distortion.”

Then Blaine nodded as if he’d been there with us. “Yeah, wish I could have been there to see it. Hey, you know what we should all do? We should see Carlos.”

I’ve noticed he goes off on tangents like this. “Who is Carlos and what does he have to do with spatial distortions?”

“You haven’t heard of Carlos?” Blaine leaned toward us in excitement. “He’s the Alakazam at the southern foot of the volcano.”

“They call him Carlos now?” I remembered stories about him. It’s nearly impossible to find Alakazam in the wild and the ones that have been spotted disappear so quickly but this one just sat around in the forest doing nothing. Sometimes people could find a few Kadabra or Abra nearby too, but that Alakazam had been there for the longest time. People thought he was meditating, but people usually come up with stupid explanations. People also said the Gyarados Rain Dance was a sign from God that if we don’t shape up, the world is going to end.

Anyway, since the Alakazam’s been there so long, the southern foot of the volcano had become a somewhat popular tourist attraction. They’d hang around, call out to… Carlos, I guess, they’d take pictures, but no one had been too close. People said there was a large force field around him, but you already know what I think of that.

Blaine nodded. “Don’t know how they settled on Carlos, but I heard they got him to respond to the name a few times.”

John tapped me on the shoulder and pointed behind me. “Check it out.”

A screen hung from the ceiling showing a news report on the weather. The cloud curl was clearly visible and shadowy snakelike figures plunged intermittently through the clouds. The Rain Dance had begun. The reporter cut to another clip of a Hyper Beam. The straight flash of light and charged particles tore through the atmosphere and lit up the clouds above like lightning. Moments later a Gyarados fell from the sky.

Most people feared the Rain Dance because of Hyper Beam. It can instantly kill a human being and some of the smaller Mons, but during a Rain Dance it’s usually fired at such high altitudes that it’s sufficiently dispersed if it ever hits the ground, and doesn’t cause much damage. The real danger is falling Gyarados. After firing a Hyper Beam they fall unconscious and plummet to the ground, usually dying on impact and occasionally crushing some unlucky structure.

This time it landed in the middle of downtown. And it wasn’t dead.

“Holy shit!” Blaine yelled. “It’s still breathing. Look at that.”

It’s body lay in a pile of rubble, slowly inhaling and exhaling. The three of us exchanged shocked looks. The authorities would have to kill it before it woke up again. An injured Gyarados couldn’t fly upon waking up, especially not after firing a Hyper Beam. It would thrash about and possibly fire another, injuring itself even further and most likely succumbing to a painful death anyway.

But then something else happened. The reporter had said that no civilians were in any of the structures at the time because they’d been evacuated earlier, but the station cut to footage of first responders arriving at the scene and finding a Pikachu cowering next to one of the unharmed buildings. It fired weak electric discharges at the rescuers out of fear and when the camera cut back to the reporter in the studio she started speculating whether the tiny electric mouse belonged to anyone.

A thought passed through my mind but I shoved it away. “No, that couldn’t be.”


End file.
